West, Texas, then and now: The U.S. Chemical Safety Board reports to the nation

Firefighters walk near burned out apartment building near fertilizer plant in West, Texas

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“The fire and explosion at West Fertilizer was preventable. It should never have occurred. It resulted from the failure of a company to take the necessary steps to avert a preventable fire and explosion and from the inability of federal, state and local regulatory agencies to identify a serious hazard and correct it.” Rafael Moure-Eraso, chairman, U.S. Chemical Safety Board

It’s been a year since the explosion in West, Texas, and the town in still recovering and looking for answers. The nation, quite properly, has an interest in what happened there too--if we are to be prepared and, indeed, if we anticipate having protections against a similar tragedy anywhere.

The fertilizer plant in West, Texas, exploded on April 17, 2013, with disastrous results: 15 dead, 180 injured and the destruction of a major part of the town where the fertilizer plant’s stockpile of ammonium nitrate exploded. This is a fertilizer that is so volatile that it’s been used by terrorists to build truck bombs — Timothy McVeigh, in Oklahoma City, in 1995, among them. A school, an apartment building and more than 200 homes and other structures were destroyed or damaged. Insurance officials estimate property damage exceeded $100 million.

Dozens of tons of ammonium nitrate were stored in flammable wooden containers. There was no sprinkler system and no fence around the property to keep out intruders.

Effective regulations and mandatory inspections might have made the difference, saving lives. Or so some thought at the time. Well, now we know: The U.S. Chemical Safety Board has just issued its report on the disaster in West, and concluded that the explosion at the fertilizer plant was preventable. Of the fifteen people who died, twelve were volunteer firefighters. The federal Board found that:

(1) Firefighters should have been trained to deal with the stockpile of ammonium nitrate but there were no requirements for that training.

(2) State regulators should not have allowed the fertilizer to be stored in wooden containers but Texas relies on voluntary regulations and so the great state of Texas did not assume a regulatory role in West.

(3) Local authorities should have kept schools and homes farther away from the plant given the volatility of the chemicals stored there but they did not; local folks have no great liking for regulation either.

(4) A “local emergency planning committee” had not adopted an emergency response plan for the plant and, no small detail this, Texas does not have a statewide fire code that might have established a minimum set of standards (such as requiring a certain distance between where chemicals are stored and flammable materials are located—a fire near where the ammonium nitrate was stored spread to the facility and caused the explosion).

Moreover, no federal agency had clear responsibility for overseeing the ammonium nitrate at the facility. Despite the fact that large quantities of ammonium nitrate were used (as noted above) to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City, the substance was not on the list of chemicals requiring risk management plans that the Environmental Protection Agency tracks.

Given that the West facility had fewer than 10 employees, moreover, it was not subject to safety inspections. By law, OSHA is barred from conducting routine inspections at such sites.

A role for the state? Well, there are 573,000 workplaces in Texas, notes the Houston Chronicle, and there are only 98 state inspectors.

The Board urged regulators to take additional steps to stop another “West” from happening again, including regulation of fertilizer plants and the use of safer, less explosive blends of the chemicals that are used in fertilizers, which, the chair noted, are available and in wide use in Europe.

Possible changes to the industry regulations are reportedly “on the table” for the Texas Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee. But, the committee said “any new measures have to keep business cost in mind.” And there is this too:

“The state committee chair believes changes will be made with little state intervention as long as everyone agrees on exactly what changes, if any, will be made.”

Tom Smith of Texans for Public Justice wants the committee to mandate public information on where all potentially dangerous materials are stored. That’s understandable. As the Houston Chronicle put it:.

“In just one 16-mile stretch of land around Houston, there are 405 facilities like this (the fertilizer facility in West). So for the safety of our communities, it's important we get this right.”

But, so far, at the state level, it looks like it’s pretty much “same old, same old.” It’s hard to understand why setting and enforcing safety standards is so hard to do. One might ask, “Why is Texas, well, Texas? It’s the culture, residents say. What makes it that way? A preference for “small government,” whatever that means, and, “limited regulation” and, of course, the usual corollary factor: politicians being too close to (and sometimes in) the industries that drive the state’s economy.

Consider the revealing coverage given to environmental issues in the run-up to the presidential election when Governor George W. Bush was governor of Texas. In 1999, a story on regulation, appearing on the front page of the New York Times, is nothing short of stunning. In "Bush Approach to Pollution: Preference for Self-Policing" there are some critical observations that have a particularly shocking impact. Including these:

. Bush believed that the best way to achieve clean air and water "is to work with local jurisdictions using market-based solutions and not try to sue our way or regulate our way to clean air and clean water;"

. Bush signed a law in 1995 that allows companies to audit themselves for environmental violations. If a company found any violations, the law allowed it to report the violations without fear of fine or penalty as long as the company presented a cleanup plan. Violations are not made public.

For years, Texas boasted a statute that allowed citizens to challenge pollution permits, for example, through a process much like a courtroom trial. The hearings were rare, the Times noted, but citizen groups did use the procedure to stop several unwanted projects, including a planned nuclear waste dump in West Texas! After Bush became governor, however, new appointees to the state commission responsible for holding the hearings, reduced the number to eight in 1998 from 25 in 1996. In four cases, state courts overturned the commission's refusal to hold a hearing.

It becomes easier to understand, now, why West occurred. But, the question is, what are we doing to prevent another West? It’s not encouraging.

In a column in Perspective--April, 2014, I criticized the efforts of those, in and outside of industry, who do their utmost to prevent regulations aimed at assuring safe and healthy environments, and featured some examples of the failure to regulate, including West.

This is what remains of a 50-unit apartment building the day after an explosion at the West Fertilizer Company destroyed the building. The explosion could have been prevented according to the U.S. Chemical Safety BoardChip Somodevilla/Getty Images

While efforts continue, on both state and national levels, not only to resist regulation but to lobby against funds for regulatory agency oversight, including monitoring and inspection, the reaction to the past year’s tragedies and environmental threats may produce a surge in will to get something done.

To ensure clean air, water and a poison-free environment, society needs rules, based on science, that call for uniform standards, enforced by more aggressive state regulation and by the appropriate agencies of the federal government, notably OSHA and the Environmental Protection Agency. No amount of falsehoods or rhetoric from industry-serving, so-called "grassroots" enterprises can hide the basic facts at issue here. Chemicals can pose hazards; we need to know what they are and be prepared to handle them safely.

Accordingly, we have to welcome the fact that the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Homeland Security and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration are considering proposals to make tragedies like that which occurred in West unlikely to happen again. And, fortunately, “public support is on the side of common sense,” according to the Houston Chronicle: In October, 2013, a national poll by Lake Research Partners showed that a majority of likely Democratic and Republican voters agreed that "the federal government should require chemical facilities to use safer chemicals and processes" when they are effective, available and affordable.” It’s a start, at least.

“Hopefully, these /federal/ agencies can do what Texas legislatures refuse to do and require the use of inherently safer chemicals to protect Texans from another West….. Nationwide, more than 100 million people live close enough to facilities handling toxic chemicals that they could be hurt if a major explosion or leak occurred."

We can’t detach ourselves from industrial and environmental hazards by distancing ourselves, by ideology, by a misplaced faith in unfettered free enterprise, or by lack of interest or information. We need appropriate, effective government regulation to safeguard our present and future. We can’t ignore what we know, now, about what happened in West. And we do know how to prevent another West. What we need to do is exercise the intelligence and the political will to get it done: Smart government taking measured, intelligent steps to protect and secure even while weighing economic needs and political realities in the near and long term.